My diabetic dog has cancer

Image via Wikipedia. "Cytology from a needle aspiration biopsy of a lymph node of a dog with lymphoma. The predominant cells are lymphoblasts. Slide was stained with a modified Wright's stain."

I had to use that as the title for this post, just because it's so hard to say. Today, Tony is wide awake, walking around the way he usually does first thing in the morning. We call this "checking the perimeter," since it does look like that's what he's doing. He wants to know where everyone is; once he knows that, he settles down for a little snooze. It all seems totally routine, but with one look at him, anybody could tell that something's wrong. He had his stitches from the biopsy removed on Wednesday and started Prednisone on Thursday (the wait time from the diagnosis was caused by his taking Rimadyl; he needed to be off it for at least a week before they could give him Prednisone, as the two interact badly, apparently). Dr. Kroll warned me that he would be very hungry and thirsty on the Prednisone, and so it has worked out. Yesterday, he emptied his breakfast and dinner bowls on the first try, which he has never done before (he likes to leave a bit for a snack). This isn't a bad thing, since he's been losing weight (now just over 8 lb.). I had even been cutting back his insulin a bit before this as he wasn't eating as much as usual, what with the change in his food (more about this later)

As to what I've been doing since the diagnosis, you can probably guess. After I finished my last post, I began researching lymphoma in dogs, looking not just at peer-reviewed veterinary journal articles, but also at what ordinary people had to say about their experiences. I felt better once I had done this; it got rid of some of the helplessness I had been feeling. And I found some interesting stuff.

The first thing I discovered is that when this happens to your best friend, you want to talk about it. There are a lot of web pages devoted to dogs who have had lymphoma, along with the stories of their treatment. There are also, as you might expect, pages and sites that are trying to sell you something. I tried to weed out as much of this as I could, but a couple were actually useful. One of these is by a guy named Ted Schneck, who is selling a book titled Curing Canine Cancer: Natural Treatments That Work (Secrets of Marty the Wonderdog). No, I did not buy the book; as I've mentioned before, I'm broke. I've already spent over a quarter of my annual income on Tony's care this year, and I can't even afford to consult with a veterinary oncologist. However, Ted seems to want to help: even if you aren't buying the book, he has free tips that he will e-mail. Of course, that gives him more chances to make his sales pitch, but I didn't mind because a couple of the tips were very helpful to me. One of them was to encourage me to take a "shotgun approach," trying anything that might help as long as it doesn't hurt. I was already leaning in that direction, but the validation, even from a layperson, made me feel that I was doing the right thing for Tony. The other thing was even better; it had to do with my behavior around Tony, and I'll explain that in a later post. In fact, I'll talk about all of these issues in individual posts, I think.

I guess I'll give Ted a plug, since he did me a favor. His url is http://www.curing-canine-cancer.com/.

A new direction

I had meant to post last Tuesday, when Tony was supposed to have his biopsy, but it was postponed until last Thursday. I have an 11AM-12:15PM class Tuesday and Thursday, so I popped him into his carseat and drove him up to the vet for his 8AM appointment, then turned around and went home. About 5 minutes after I walked in the door, the phone rang and the caller ID showed it was the vet. Reading that, you probably have the same sense of foreboding that I had then. It wasn't good. While they were doing the pre-anesthesia exam, Dr. Kroll noticed that Tony's muzzle was swollen on one side. He has a mass there and another on the other side of the mouth towards the back. She began listing my options, and I stopped her as soon as she pointed out that he was there and prepped already, so it would be easy to biopsy the masses as well as his skin lesions. "Do it," I said. I didn't want her to tell me how much it would cost right then, figuring that when I went to pick him up was soon enough for that and I didn't want to be tempted to postpone finding out what this fresh catastrophe was going to mean.

I picked him up Thursday night, and he seemed a bit groggy, but otherwise his same old self. Even the techs were saying that if he didn't look the way he did (much of his fur shaved off, his face swollen, etc.), you wouldn't know there was anything wrong with him from his behavior. All weekend long he was fairly peppy and alert, and he still is today. But when I got home after my 8AM class today, I had another call from Dr. Kroll. The news was bad.

The biopsies showed that the masses and the skin lesions had the same cause: lymphoma. She was more upset than I was; I was numb (still am). I told her that I needed some time to take this in and figure out what questions to ask, and she told me to call her anytime, saying, "I'm always here." That actually made me laugh, because she certainly seems to be there all the time, even on days when I know she is scheduled to be off.

I wanted to get this posted as soon as possible for my family members who live all around the country, but I really don't have much more to say now. It looks as though this blog is about to go in a new direction.

The Zemanta feed just popped up the photo below with the caption "Shuttle's exuberance for life, lymphoma and all." I'm going to take this as a good omen.

Image by dglassme via Flickr

Insomnia strikes again

Can't sleep. Again. I have been like this as long as I can remember, although my mother claims I slept fine as a baby. Tony is a big part of my sleeping trouble. About three or four months before he was diagnosed, he started needing to go out in the middle of the night (one of the most obvious symptoms of diabetes), and my sleep was way out of whack until he went on insulin.

I'm one of those people who has trouble falling asleep and staying asleep (and, of course, falling asleep again). In the mid-1980s, I tried an experiment where I used self-hypnosis tapes to get myself in a pattern where I slept only four and a half hours a night (this was based on the 90 minute sleep cycle most people have); after 3 cycles, I would wake up easily, and I was pretty alert. I did that for almost a year, and accomplished a lot, but I think it made the overall sleep problem worse, not to mention that what made me stop was that my arthritis was getting worse, too.

I eventually got back to where I was getting at least six hours most nights, when Tony developed his bladder problem in June, and that set up another problem, what with the blood sugar crashes and so on. I couldn't sleep because I was afraid he'd have a crash and I wouldn't wake up, and now that he's stabilized, more or less, HE'S not sleeping at night. Part of his problem is almost certainly his skin condition; he's not scratching as much as I expect him to, but he has trouble getting comfortable. The last round of antibiotics doesn't seem to have done much, so on Tuesday, we're back to the vet for his biopsy. I have to trim all of the mats he's developed from the "extreme" shedding this thing causes, and he's going to look like hell. In the past week, he's lost fur on his face for the first time, so he's nowhere near looking his best. His mood seems good, anyway, and since he finished the antibiotic, his appetite is better than it's been since spring.

But he keeps waking me between 2-4 AM. It takes me an hour or so to fall asleep, so it seems as if I only had a few minutes of sleep before he's bouncing against my bed, wanting to go out.
My short-term memory and general recall have been taking a beating from menopause, and the lack of sleep is compounding the problem. Just tonight, I had to stop myself from freaking out because I thought I had lost a set of essays that needed to be graded. It turns out that I returned them on Monday.

I'm taking another shot at sleep now. I really just wanted to update about the biopsy.